Monday, June 10, 2013

Staying in Gera This Transfer

Hey Mom!

I am glad that David is home from his mission and had a good experience.
It is really crazy how different our missions must be. He was dealing with
poverty and here everyone can just get money from the government without even
having to work if they really wanted to, and they can still live quite decently
off of that.

We didn't get affected by the flood here, but there were a lot of people
who did. Our branch president, President Zaumsegel, lives in a town that got hit
pretty hard by the flood, and his house was only one of three houses that wasn't
affected. It has been raining a lot though, and we are hoping that it will stop
raining so frequently because contacting is hard enough in Gera, and in Germany,
when it is raining, Germans don't like to talk to anyone; they just want to get
inside, which I can understand.

Well, I am sure you are eagerly awaiting the news on transfers, so I won't
make you wait any longer than you have to. I am staying in Gera and will be
joined by Elder Watts. He has been on the mission for the same amount of time as
Elder Colson, so he is going into his 5th transfer. He is way awesome, I talked
to him a few times before. Elder Goodrich is going down by Nuernberg to a city
called Bayreuth (pronounced bye-roit). He is pretty excited, and I think he will
enjoy himself there. Transfer day is on Thursday, so I will pick up Elder Watts
at that time. Other changes within the district: Elder Hunter is training, Elder
Wichtermann is being transferred and he is being replaced as zone leader by
Elder Bonzo, my MTC companion, Elder Moore is getting transferred from Werdau
and is being replaced by Elder Newell, and then there will now be sisters in
Jena. It should be a really cool transfer.

Anyway, in terms of this week, we taught the least amount of lessons I
have ever taught on my mission in one week: just one. It was a really cool
experience though. Elder Goodrich and I were contacting on Friday and we had had
no lessons up to this point, and Elder Goodrich asked me if I believed we could
get a lesson with someone on the street. I told him that if we endured to the
end of our contacting time, I believed we could. Right after I said that,
everyone just started saying no and it was really hard not to want to stop
contacting, but we kept going. We came down to the last 15 minutes of street
contacting and ran into a woman that we talked to about the Book of Mormon. We
testified of its truthfulness and she said that she believed it was true because
she could see we were being honest. I told her at that point that if the Book of
Mormon was true, then Joseph Smith is a prophet and the church has been
restored, and she was kind of speechless. We tried to give her a Book of Mormon,
insisting that it was free and everything, but she said she had seen it in the
library and wanted to read it there. She also wouldn't give us her contact info,
but we at least gave her our number and the address of the church so that she
could get in touch with us to talk about it. It was a really cool
experience.

We didn't have any other lessons. Several appointments fell out, and we had a lot of time where
we had to do other things. We did service with Bruder Krause again, and also
went to Jena for a Zone training meeting, where I gave a theme on choosing to be
happy. It went really well, and I hope the other missionaries in my zone got
something out of it. In spite of having not many lessons, Dominik, our new
investigator, came to our ward activity and really enjoyed himself. I hope he
can start progressing, and won't have to work so much that we never meet with
him.

This next week will be extremely busy. Since Elder Hunter is training, he
has to go to Frankfurt tomorrow, which we didn't know. We thought they would go
up on Wednesday. For this reason, we have to take over all of their appointments
that they won't be able to cancel or push back, so we have a lot to do.

Well, that is pretty much it for this week. I hope everything is going well
and that everyone is happy! Love you!